Cross Pens

 Dec 10

CNET is the new Consumer Reports, except a lot better. Look at all these reviews: the best cheap wine. Frying pans. They're not just electronics anymore. CNET is where I found these awesome blankets. Check this out: 7 pens, $14 to $575.

I'm surprised there aren't any Cross pens on CNET's list. Maybe that just shows I'm out of date. I got a Cross pen around 2005, about $20 or so I think. I still use it every day. It's basically indestructible. 

So, you know: don't give me a pen for Christmas. I'm set for life, and if a young person inherits my Cross, they're set for life.

 

Dec 31

I told you that I had had my Cross pen for decades and that it was pretty much indestructible. Which was true. So, naturally, about a day or two after that I lost it.

Got a new one from Amazon, but I didn't realize that not all Cross ballpoint pens are identical. Far from it, turns out! So the refills I had for the old one won't fit into this one. Also, the old one rolled open and shut, silently as a ninja. This one clicks.

You're thinking: it clicks. What, is that actually a problem?

Yes it is. A first-world problem.

And now, suddenly, I'm wondering about all sorts of things. There are some very wealthy literary families. People whose great-great-grandparents had Henry James and Turgenev over for dinner. Are their homes filled with veritable piles of Cross ballpoints, the way there were piles of Bic Stics at home when I was a child?

And this thought takes me a step further: would the thought of Cross ballpoints give brain-nausea to some of the economically-elite among the literary, because they still refuse to convert from fountain pens to ballpoints?

Dec 31

I know how important this topic is to you, so I'll be keeping you updated. 

I lost the old Cross pen, the one I'd had for decades, somewhere between Kroger and home. In Kroger I used it to cross items off my shopping list. And when I got home, it was gone.

My best guess is that it slipped out of my right front pants pocket, where I keep the Moleskine notebook, the pen and the phone. Hopefully it's somewhere here on the floor in the house or on the floor of the car, and I'll find it again.

I'm hoping to find it again, not expecting to. More likely it fell on the floor in Kroger, or on the ground in their parking lot, and it's gone.

So I was thinking: would the pen fit into the pocket of the Moleskine notebook?

It does. I wonder whether Bruce Chatwin kept a pen in the pocket of his Moleskine?

Bruce Chatwin was the douchebag over-rated travel writer who is responsible for Moleskines being known as Moleskines.

Moleskines are actually very good notebooks, and the Cross fits right into that pocket, so when I went to Kroger today, I wasn't so worried.

And I know that makes you very happy.

Solar: Utility-Scale vs Rooftop

Headlines tell us of reports which show that utility-scale solar energy is much less expensive than rooftop solar. 

I assume this means that rooftop is more expensive in terms of $ to build the system per watt/hour produced.And I have no reason at all to doubt that this is true.

However, if you compare the cost to the consumer per watt/hour, presumably some people can save with rooftop. And presumably those numbers are not in these reports, nor are numbers to do with net metering.

 

I don't claim to know everything about solar energy, or utilities vs rooftop. Far from it. I'm having a very hard time finding information, and it seems that in the past decade or so, intentionally-confusing jargon to do with solar and utilities has grown at a monstrous rate.

 

I'm sure that utilities which are private and primarily concerned with pleasing their shareholders would much rather sell electricity to a consumer than have that consumer generate his own, or even compete on a level playing field, generating an excess and selling that excess back to the grid at fair rates. I'm also sure that such privately-held utilities would like for people to believe that rooftop is an option only for very wealthy people, and not even try to become better-informed.

 

The word "utility" means "the quality of being useful or helpful," or "Something which is useful or helpful." I am quite certain that some utilities are very different than others. But, the ones who don't even try to serve the common good when they can make greater profits instead: should we even call them "utilities"?

Dream Log: Cats and the Multiverse

 Last night I dreamed I was playing with George, a cat I used to have. I can't seem to find a photo of George, but he looked somewhat like this:

George was being very affectionate and purring a lot, just like he did in real life. But then he went to my laptop, pushed a few keys and showed me how to switch from one to another of the infinite number of universes which exist according to some theories of physics.

In real life he NEVER did that. 

As soon as he touched the keyboard with his paws, we began to communicate telepathically, and I now also understood how to use my laptop to "browse" universes, as it were. 

The universes ranged from horrific to boring to wondrous. We found one in which cats were flying around everywhere in little cat-sized flying cars. The humans were all artists and scientists, and the distinction between artists and scientist which had begun in Earth's Western civilization in late Renaissance did not exist. Finance existed only as the means of equitably providing an abundance to all sentient beings. Burning things as a source of energy, and war, were in the very distant past. It was a lot like "Star Trek"s version of Earth, except with many more cats in tiny flying cars. 

George was understandably eager to try one of those kittycat-cars, and away he zoomed, but he was back again before lunch, more affectionate than ever. The two of us became a well-known sight, mostly together, sometimes with George walking beside me, sometime with him luxuriously stretched out across my shoulders, so relaxed that he often fell asleep there. Before long George was working as an information technologist and I was a well-known poet. 

Neither of us was in any particular hurry to get back to Earth.

To repeat: the science-humanities split so familiar to us did not exist. Exhibitions, lectures, conferences, projects couldn't have been identified as one or the other, as STEM or humanities. The widespread disdain for one half of intellectual and aesthetic achievement, or the other, did not exist. It was as everyday and accepted for a mathematician or physician, in presenting their latest findings, to refer to a famous painting or opera, as for a book of cultural history to include differential equations. George and I, coming from Earth, described Earth's science-humanities split as being as if cats and humans could not telecommunicate with each other.

Medieval Annals

The terms "annals," "chronicle" and "history" are to a certain extent interchangeable, as Tacitus demonstrated around the beginning of the 2nd century AD, by calling one of his major historical works the Historia, and the other one the Annales -- or perhaps it was someone else who gave the titles to Tacitus' works, I don't actually know for sure. 

While conceding, therefore, that all three terms have been applied to any and all types of historical writing, for the purpose of this blog post, I am using the term "annal" to refer only to that form of Medieval historical writing, within the Catholic/Latin sphere, in which the entries are all labelled by year, in which a typical year's entry might contain as little as a sentence or two -- a king or prince is born or dies, or the Emperor rides to Constance to celebrate Christmas, a comet is seen, famine and/or drought is suffered locally -- or a year might not be entered at all, and in which the entry for a year rarely exceed a page in a modern octavio edition. There is typically not more than one entry per year, but it is clear that sometimes the entry for a past year has later been revised or added to. The language is usually Latin. In the 12th century, French and Italian began to appear in some annals. The only early non-Latin annal of which I am aware is the famous Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, which began in the 9th century. But it should be kept in mind that this was just one annal among many Latin annals made in England. Medieval writing in Catholic lands was, overwhelmingly, Latin writing. 

 

If some reader happens to know the precise boundaries between annals, chronicles and histories, and wishes to assist my readers and damn my astounding ignorance upon this point, I, of course, would be delighted.

While ancient Latin and Greek histories had each been the work of one author, who signed his work, an annal could have many different contributors. Some Medieval authors wrote histories in the style of ancient authors. These were usually members of the clergy, but their works were treated differently than the annals of the monasteries. Whether they were humble monks or Popes, whether they stayed in one abbey or traveled widely, their names, in most of the cases I know, were never hidden from us: Gregory of Tours, the venerable Bede, William of Malmesbury, Otto of Freising, William of Tyre, Matthew Paris and so forth.

Sometimes the authors of some parts of the annals are known to modern scholars, sometimes they have conjectures as to authorship, and often the authors are unknown. The style of the Latin prose could be quite good, and helpful in identifying its author, or it could be quite ordinary. The annal as a whole was thought of as the product of a monastery or cathedral, in England, France, or Germany, while in Italy some cities also maintained their own annals. An annal may represent as much as several centuries' worth of history recorded on behalf of a particular religious institution or city, and, unsurprisingly, events of local significance are given greater weight than they might be in histories which strive for universal relevance. On the one hand, this may seems to lend to annals a more trivial nature compared to histories. However, the modern historian, while recognizing in the famous Medieval historians forerunners in his own genre, may often make much more day-to-day use of the anonymous annalist, precisely because of the abundance of detailed local information.

Many of the Medieval annals, along with chronicles, histories, letters, decrees, laws, etc, etc, of Medieval Germany and surrounding countries, are collected in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH); Italian annals are among the works collected in the Rerum Italicorum Scriptorum; and British annals are among the Chronicles and Memorials of Great Britain and Ireland During the Middle Ages (Rolls Series). And there are many more Medieval Latin annals, from Iberia, from Scandinavia, from the Catholic Slavic lands, in other collections. Still more annals from all across Latin Medieval Europe can be found in scholarly journals. And some are still only in manuscripts, still await edition and publication.

Dream Log: "Friends" with Money

Money money money money. Moolah. Skrilla. Cabbage. Cheddar. L'argent. Clams. Lucre. Currency. Simolians. Smackeroonies. You know what I'm talking about.

I dreamed that the characters from "Friends" were real, and that I knew what had happened to them since the show. I was not a friend of theirs. Not really even an acquaintance. More of an observer of the Friends. 

 

Ross and Rachel stayed married for 61 years! What happened then? Divorce? Death? I don't know. But somehow, I do know that they made love to each other 5 times during those 61 years. They made love to OTHER people much MORE than that. For example: on their wedding day, Rachel said something, and Ross, not for the first time, over-reacted. But during their wedding reception was the first time he had a 3-way with Rachel's sisters, played by Reese Witherspoon and Christina Applegate, and Rachel got really mad -- it was sort of like what happened over and over again in the show.

Don't feel too bad for Rachel, though; she had lots of sex, just, not with Ross. They got along pretty well with each other, just, not in that one way. Like in the show.

Chandler quit his job in advertising, and became an actor. Monica was doing better and better as a chef so they didn't need Chandler's income anymore. They never said in the show what sort of business Chandler was in, but in the dream, I knew it was advertising.

In real life, at least in the US, lots of people go from advertising to show business. I don't know why, but I do know why a lot of show business sucks so hard: all those assholes from advertising. You thought you were going to spread your wings, but you're still a weasel. And weasels don't have wings. 

Phoebe stayed on guitar and vocals, but Mike joined her on air piano -- yes: air piano -- and they made it big. Multi-platinum albums all over the world. They became billionaires. Air piano.

You may recall that Joey went out to Hollywood after having been in a huge blockbuster movie with Gary Oldman. In my dream, he kept making blockbusters. He starred in like twenty hugely successful movies in a row, it made him a billionaire. Then he started directing and producing and made some REAL money, and the first thing you know, Joey's head of Paramount Studios.

But he missed his Friends. So he re-located Paramount HQ from Hollywood to Manhattan, bought a huge townhouse in Greenwich Village, just a block away from where Joey and Chandler and Monica and Rachel lived during the show, with Central Perk downstairs. And he gave the townhouse to Chandler and Monica and moved in with them.